Professor Schleck’s interests and research include Renaissance literature, travel writing and early modern colonialism, the Global Renaissance, history of science, and cultural materialism/ Marxism. She offers graduate courses on the intersections of gender and colonialism, and early modern discourses of race and gender. She is additionally interested in Queer Theory, and regularly teaches courses on Queer Shakespeare, which are often featured as courses of interest to WGS students. She loves the way early modern ideas about sexuality and the human body are so surprisingly different from our own, and how authors like Shakespeare play around with those in provoking and often hysterical ways, breaking binaries and staging scenes that still have strong transgressive potential today.
Professor Schleck’s first book, Telling True Tales of Islamic Lands: Forms of Mediation in Early English Travel Writing, 1575-1630, examines early modern English printed works which claimed that their stories about Muslim lands and peoples were “true,” interrogating what a “true story” might mean in this era and how such texts asked to be read. Her current book project draws on theories of masculinity and of “epistemologies of ignorance” to read the British East India Company archive as the place where global traders drew on the metaphorical resources of a gendered society to craft their vision of the global corporation and its place in the English nation. She co-edits a book series of her own with Amsterdam University Press, Connected Histories in the Early Modern World.
WGS Courses
WMNS 101: Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies
WMNS 291: (Special Topics) Global Feminisms